Igor Aleinikov

In the 80s Igor and Gleb Aleinikov belonged to the school of Moscow conceptualism and took active part in art underground activities, working in such genres as mail-art, book-art, soc-art, and home-art. Brothers Aleinikov made history as founders of Parallel Cinema, experimental underground movies shot on narrow film, the aesthetics and ideology of which were absolutely incompatible with the canons common for Soviet cinema. In March 1994 Igor Aleinikov died in a plane accident, a year after his brother founded the Cine Fantom Club.

"The brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov are the leaders of the Moscow school. Add conflicting visual textures (often shooting from the TV screen, the Aleinikovs mix fiction with documentary
footage) and whimsical editing, and you will have a movie that reaches completion only before the audience. Cinematic speech here develops into a special case of language - each sign becomes a prototype for the whole; each text turns into its own context. The Aleinikovs' case proves how incidental the relationship is between the avant-garde and society, even as rigid a society as the Soviet one. The film makers see all social concepts as if they were reflected in Lewis Carroll's Looking Glass. These concepts are nothing to them but the items of mass mythology or a set of stereotypes. The Aleinikovs' Tractors (1987), for example, is an out-of-synch reexamination of the myth of the 'iron horse'; for them, traditional communist values are just a pretext for playful meditation." (from Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, eds. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 41)